Princeton vs. Penn Odds, Pick, Prediction: Using Luck to Evaluate the Ivy League Finale

I don't make college basketball spread bets often, but when I do, it's because of the Luck Rankings.

Okay, okay, those are the NFL Luck Rankings I linked, but the luck-based sides and totals that our Luck Rankings identified went 56-33-3 (62.9%) overall in the 2023/24 NFL season, and I'm applying the same logic to today's Ivy League regular season finale between current leaders Princeton and second-from-bottom Penn.

The basic premise of the Luck Rankings is that teams are either over or under-valued thanks to some fluky results that went their way. In the case of Princeton and Penn, Princeton has ended up with a rather fortuitous 23-3 record, while Penn should have better results than their 11-17 record indicates.

Using a few different luck metrics, we can see why +6.5 is a bit too long for the Quakers.

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Princeton vs. Penn Pick

Pick: Penn +6.5 (-115)

First, KenPom has Princeton ranked 66th in luck, while Penn sits 333rd of 362 teams.

This difference of 267 places represents nearly 75% of the maximum luck difference of the current 362 NCAA Division-I teams. That's on par with the minimum threshold needed to be an NFL Luck Rankings game.

In addition, the KenPom Luck Gap here is 12.6%, but we're 25-plus games into the season, compared to a 30% threshold needed in the NFL after 13-games. As we get more games and as Luck regresses to the mean, we can get away with smaller gaps as our sample-size grows.

However, KenPom luck just reflects something called second-order luck. It's taking schedule-adjusted efficiencies and comparing them to the actual win-loss record. What KenPom doesn't do is use third-order luck, which is where our Action Network NFL Luck Rankings really shines and uses something we call Expected Scores instead of actual scores.

To be a third-order luck metric, KenPom luck would need to use expected efficiencies rather than actual efficiencies. If we could come up with an expected college basketball score for each game and schedule adjust that, then we'd be in business.

Fortunately, Shot Quality has a version of this that, while not perfect, gets us a good chunk of the way there.

Using Shot Quality's luck metric, we can see the Luck Gap between the two Ivy League schools is 33.05%, which is even bigger than the KenPom Luck Gap.

Plugging in Shot Quality's efficiencies in place of the KenPom efficiencies and we see this should be even closer than the 75-69 scoreline that KenPom is predicting, and most of that comes on the Princeton side of the ball.

Below is a table of points-per-possession using KenPom and using Shot Quality for Princeton's offense and Penn's defense.

We can see both Princeton's offensive output drops, while Penn's defensive points allowed drops, both of which contribute to a lower expected points per possession for Princeton.

Similarly, there is a dropoff for Penn's offensive efficiency while Princeton's defensive efficiency improves from KenPom to Shot Quality, however the dropoffs when Penn has the ball is less than when Princeton has the ball, showing KenPom is overestimating Princeton's projected score more than they are overestimating Penn's projected score.

Thus, if KenPom is already saying Princeton has been lucky and is projecting them to win by six, certainly Shot Quality projects an even lower scoring game where Penn on average loses by less than six. This is exacerbated by the fact that the bulk of Penn's bad luck has come more recently, losing 10 of their last 12 thanks to a dip in three-point percentage even though their free throw shooting has improved.

These two teams both play a slow enough pace and shoot enough from outside that even a return to long-term shooting averages is enough to help Penn cover this 6.5 number, let alone if there's any positive variance on the Quakers' side.

Earlier this year these teams played to a seven-point margin despite the Quakers shooting 33.3% from downtown compared to the Tigers' 42.1%.

I'll back the underdog plus the points here at anything longer than +5, and would lean toward the under, although at present it's adjusted down enough to account for the luck that it's not a full-fledged bet unless the line moves up to 143 or higher.

Pick: Penn +6.5 (-115)